June 21st, 2009

The Chinese government has continued to require that Internet censorship software be preinstalled on all computers sold in China after July 1, though  reports  said this week that the requirement had been eased.

An employee of Beijing city government’s Spiritual Civilization Office said,  Chinese officials are trying to assert more Internet control and this is indicated by the city government’s plan to recruit 10,000 volunteers by summer’s end to monitor online content.

The plan was presented in a document submitted Tuesday by the Beijing Internet Administration Office during a meeting in which city officials discussed “purifying social civilization,” said the employee, who identified herself only by her surname, Guo. She said she had no further details on the plan.

Chinese authorities have also sought to assert control by directly warning some online services. On Thursday, for example, a government-supported Internet watchdog group criticized Google’s Chinese-language Web site for linking to “pornographic and vulgar” sites. The group, the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, said www.google.cn had already been criticized in January and April and that it must purge the offending links.

China’s central and local governments use a vast array of programs and human monitors to block Internet content deemed pornographic or politically harmful to the Communist Party, like Web sites discussing Tibet or the Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement.

The system of censorship is nicknamed the Great Firewall, and savvy computer users in China usually use software to circumvent it, thinking little of it. But the government’s new rule that computer makers install censorship software on computers has inflamed antigovernment sentiment among Chinese computer users.

Many people say the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, will be used to block Web sites with politically unacceptable content, even though officials insist that the software will be used primarily to censor pornography.

Computer experts also discovered severe weaknesses in the software that would let hackers hijack computers. Chinese officials say they have ordered the developers to fix these problems.

Trade groups representing major American computer makers, including Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell, which have significant market shares in China, have been asking the Chinese government to rescind the requirement that Green Dam be preinstalled on computers but have seen no change in the Chinese position.

Four trade groups based in the United States have sent a statement to the Chinese government asking it to “reconsider implementing its new mandatory filtering software requirement.”

On Wednesday, the major American computer makers said they had yet to hear anything concrete from China regarding the possibility of making installations of Green Dam optional.

Lenovo, the largest computer maker in China, did not respond to requests for comment.

Confusion was sown Monday when China Daily, the country’s official English-language newspaper, quoted an unnamed official in the software department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology saying that the government was requiring that the software be offered on a CD-ROM packaged with new computers or be placed on hard drives as setup files only.

Some people interpreted that as the government backing down from its rule that Green Dam be installed, but soon it became clear that the official was not speaking in an authoritative role. Employees at the ministry’s software department, reached by telephone, refused to clarify the government’s position. No government official has given any statement this week indicating that the policy has changed.

The US Congress on Thursday summoned executives of Facebook, Google, and Yahoo to attend a hearing in a bid to find how they are tracking consumers for advertising purposes.

The hearing was held jointly between two House subcommittees, one on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, and the other on Communications, Technology and the Internet.

More importantly, the hearing signals an increasing interest on Washington’s part into what online companies are doing with all the data they have on their customers.

There are the privacy advocates who view this online monitoring as intrusive because their travels through the digital media are being monitored and digital dossiers on them are being created and even bought and sold.

But there is also the industry which argues that any privacy regulation would be a knock-out for commerce. Interactive Advertising Bureau Online said advertising revenue fell 5% in the first quarter of 2009, which is the sharpest fall so far. One of the stated goals of the bureau, a trade group whose members include AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and most major online media sites, is to “fend off adverse legislation and regulation.”

The industry groups are arguing for self-regulation. In February, the Federal Trade Commission released a report that generally supported that approach, but warned that industry needed to create better, stricter self-regulatory standards soon to avoid regulation.

In their presentations, Google, Yahoo and Facebook all argued that they were careful with user information and gave users a choice about what data was used, while privacy advocates along with the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Privacy Information Center and US Public Interest Research Group, take issue.